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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Lonesome Road

One of the many things I LOVE to do is sing and play music.  I grew up with a family who had a band and we traveled across the U.S. and Canada.  I spent quite a few years as a child living in motels, traveling many hours, seeing new places,  basically an unorthodox growing up.

At 14 I was able to join my parents' band and continued to play professionally for awhile.  There were many changes that came about then one of which was me growing up, getting married, moving on with my life.  Sadly this seemed to interfere with my music and I neglected playing for awhile.

Then fast forward to 2001, after a couple of divorces, finding a career, living on my own for the first time ever, I realized I had really done some growing up and it was time to figure out what I REALLY liked to do for myself.  That was music.

Singing was always my passion and I played flute and sax as well.  It is quite hard to accompany myself singing while trying to blow on a flute or sax at that same time.  I decided to buy a guitar and ask my dad to teach me.  My first guitar purchase was a Big Baby Taylor acoustic.

Via phone, my dad was able to describe how to play chords and how to finger pick them.  I spent many an hour sitting on my couch, watching TV and alternating between G, D, C, and A.  When I was able to maneuver them well I had a million songs open up to me that I could play and sing.  This along with doing the occasional gig with my Dad and Stepmom, Trihala, music is back in my life again!!!

In 2002, I met my husband and best friend.  He too played guitar and worked as a recording/production director for radio stations.  We instantly had creativity and a means to record and make music.  It has been so much fun with him and since then we have gotten into ukulele's too.  He actually contracted U.A.S. (ukulele acquisition syndrome) and owns MANY but it has been worth it because he plays beautifully.

Now that I have music back  in my life in a wonderful way there are all sorts of things we do.  One of them is use of portable 4 or 8 channel digital recorder.  My husband bought himself an 8-track recorder so he gave me his old 4-track.  There is nothing I love more than singing, listening, and arranging harmonies so I thought a fun song for me to experiment with was James Taylor's 'Lonesome Road'.

Here is my first ever attempt at using my recorder.  All voices are me as I overlaid harmonies with myself.  Hope you enjoy:




Saturday, June 16, 2012



This is my baby.  She is fat, lazy, cranky, and deformed (she is a crooked tail American), but she is my baby.  I got her for my birthday when she was a kitten when Darren and I just met each other in 2002.  Although I know she has a few years to go, she is getting slower and I have to realize she won't be around forever.  So, I need to put out there how great she is.

She was born in a barn with a whole litter of kittens.  I walked into the barn and their food bowl was up on a table.  ALL the kittens scattered as fast as you could blink, but not Astral and this is when she established herself from the beginning as an attention whore.  She also established herself as a food whore (which is why she now goes by the nickname of Blobbo at 22 lbs.  She loves it I am sure).

Here is her claim to fame though.  She loves attention SOOOO much that she was trainable.  She gives high-fives on demand because she might get petted afterward.  She will do it for anyone.  I totally wanted to train her to fetch and play dead but my life did not allow.  However, I have no doubt I could have done it and still if things free up, I will try because I think nothing is below her, as long as there is a petting at the end.  I love you Astral a.k.a. Blobbo.

Thursday, June 14, 2012



This is Casey James.  He is an entrant for American Idol Season 9.  Adorable, likable, and one of my high points for Countryfest 2012.  My husband works for the station that puts this on so we could totally use this as a photo safari!  I was not behind the scenes at this point but am very proud of this picture.  I am happy with the DoF of this one.  At the point we got backstage he was clearly doing this as an acoustic gig and that made me love him more.  He sounded great, he looked great.